Ian Williams is an author and award-winning journalist who has reported from across the world.
He covered business and technology for the Sunday Times before moving to television. He was a foreign correspondent first for Channel 4 News in Moscow (1992–1995) and Asia (1995–2006), and then for NBC News (2006–2015), based in Bangkok and Beijing.
Ian has travelled and reported from across China. He has also covered conflicts in the Balkans, the Middle East and Ukraine. He won Emmy and BAFTA awards for his discovery and reporting on the Serb detention camps during the war in Bosnia. More recently he has studied cyber issues at Royal Holloway and at the War Studies Department at King’s College, London.
Articles and interviews
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The Spectator, 27 April 2024
‘It had been billed as an electrifying encounter – the US Secretary of State preparing to confront Beijing with a catalogue of global misdemeanours, ranging from stepped up support for Russian aggression against Ukraine to the intimidation of ships in the South China Sea belonging to US treaty ally, the Philippines, and the systematic breaking of world trade rules by flooding the market with heavily subsidised electric vehicles (EVs) and other renewable tech’
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The Spectator, 24 April 2024
‘The target of Wednesday’s dawn raid has been on the radar of western security services for some time. There has been growing concern that Nuctech, which manufactures airport baggage scanners for European airports and ports, poses a potentially serious risk to national security. But the European Union officials who raided the Warsaw and Rotterdam offices of the Chinese company this week were far more interested in the company’s spreadsheets, as they searched for evidence of unfair trade practices’
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The Spectator, 24 April 2024
‘In the years following his resignation as prime minister, David Cameron appeared to become the poster child for elite capture by the Chinese Communist party. This is a term used to describe the process by which the CCP co-opts former officials and business people, usually through lucrative jobs and contracts with CCP-linked entities’
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The Sunday Times, 30 March 2024
‘The warning was chilling: there is an “urgent risk” that Chinese hackers are installing bugs in western computer systems that are capable of destroying or disrupting critical services, including water, energy, transport and communications.’
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The Spectator, 28 March 2024
‘Dangling the promise of the China market has been a familiar mantra from Chinese leaders ever since the country began on the road of ‘reform and opening’ four and a half decades ago. It is a mantra that has bewitched the boardrooms of Western companies, frequently leading to the suspension of rational business judgements as executives were transfixed by the promise of selling a billion of whatever widgets they were peddling.’
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The Spectator, 22 February 2024
‘This week a security deal was announced that could see Chinese police on the streets of Hungary. Despite this, there was remarkably little fanfare about the agreement – just a few vague details in public statements made days after the deal was signed between the interior ministers of the two countries. Yet is represents another troubling challenge by Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orban to both Nato and the EU, of which he remains an increasingly troublesome member.’
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The Sunday Times, 6 August 2023
‘Senior commanders have vanished or been found dead. Rumours of corruption and even the possible sale of military secrets swirl. President Xi Jinping has installed new generals at the top while issuing ever more strident demands for absolute loyalty amid a surge in war-like rhetoric’
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The Spectator, 29 July 2023
‘This is the week that James Cleverly planned to be in Beijing to ‘engage, robustly and also constructively’ with China’s communist leaders. But the Foreign Secretary put his trip on hold because the man he planned to engage went missing. Since 25 June foreign minister Qin Gang has vanished without trace, leaving Cleverly twiddling his thumbs and the world wondering what on earth is going on at the top of the Chinese Communist party’
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The Spectator, 8 June 2023
The crypt of St John’s Waterloo feels serene and secure, a world away from the bustling city above. ‘I will spend the day here, because I feel safe here,’ Badiucao tells me. The dissident political cartoonist, who has been called ‘China’s Banksy’, is preparing to display his work on the crypt’s newly restored brick walls as part of an exhibition by exiled artists. ‘I don’t walk alone in any city. I don’t feel safe,’ he says.
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The Spectator, 3 June 2023
‘The Chinese Communist party is probably the funniest thing that exists,’ the dissident artist Ai Weiwei once told me, ‘but it doesn’t have a sense of humour.’
The brave band of comics in China’s fledgling stand-up comedy scene are discovering that poking fun at the grim-faced old men who run the country with an ever-tighter grip is a dangerous pursuit.
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The Spectator, 25 March 2023
The Chinese Communist party faces a conundrum: it wants to lead the world in artificial intelligence and yet it is terrified of anything with a mind of its own.
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The Spectator, 22 March 2023
It was perhaps the most intriguing moment of their Moscow summit. As Xi Jinping left the Kremlin last night, he stood face to face with Vladimir Putin and told the Russian leader, ‘Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years and we are driving this change together’.
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Daily Mail, 18 March 2023
China has an estimated 30 million unsold or uncompleted homes. That's on top of an estimated 65 million homes — roughly equivalent to one home for every person in the UK — that have been sold as investments but are still unoccupied. Dozens of cities, with all the trappings of urban life except people.
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The Spectator, 21 March 2023
It hardly seems like the most propitious time for Xi Jinping to be visiting Moscow. There’s an international arrest warrant out for his host Vladimir Putin for war crimes, and the man Xi has described as his ‘best friend’ spent the weekend inspecting land he’s snatched from Ukraine – in gross violation of the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, which Xi endlessly trumpets.
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The Sunday Times, 1 January 2023
The Covid-19 pandemic has gone full circle. Three years after it first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the virus is ripping through the country after a rapid and chaotic reopening — and the Communist Party’s lack of transparency is once again putting the world on edge …
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The Andrew Castle show on LBC, 29 December 2022
'We seem to have gone full circle from three years ago, the pandemic epicentre is back in China.'
Author Ian Williams says the 'wilful lack of transparency' from the Chinese Communist Party is putting the rest of the world 'on edge'
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Carole Walker's show on Times Radio, 27 December 2022
Talking about China’s latest threats to Taiwan.
"If a serious invasion was on the cards, we would see the build-up to it."
Taiwan's defence, geography and climate make it a difficult country to invade, explains Ian Williams, journalist and author.
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The Stand podcast with Eamon Dunphy, 30 November 2022
Journalist and author Ian Williams talks to Eamon about the recent protests across China as factory workers, migrants, students and others come out into the streets to protest against Xi Jinping and his lockdown policies. Ian Williams' most recent book 'The Fire of the Dragon: China’s New Cold War’, published by Birlinn, is now available.
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The Spectator, 10 December 2022
China’s scrapping of strict Covid controls represents not so much a shift in gear, as a screeching hand-break turn. It is abrupt and haphazard and comes at a particularly risky time. Hundreds of millions of people will soon be on the move for Chinese New Year, which is next month, and the spread of the virus, already fast, will accelerate rapidly. The transition to living with Covid has not been easy for any country but will be particularly difficult for China – and dangerous for the communist party.
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The Sunday Times, 4 December 2022
Shanghai police descended in force on to the city’s underground railway system demanding passengers hand over unlocked phones and checking them for images of protests and forbidden apps. They moved methodically along lines of nervous passengers, agents of an Orwellian surveillance state …
… the claustrophobic repression that underpins Xi’s rule as leader of the Chinese Communist Party is grounded in cyberspace. Xi is using tools of surveillance and social control that Chairman Mao could never have dreamed of: he has built a digital totalitarian state.
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The Spectator, 1 December 2022
It is a measure of the dark places Xi Jinping is taking China politically and economically that the rule of Jiang Zemin, who died on Wednesday aged 96, is being looked back upon with some nostalgia. During Jiang’s later years, ‘toad worship culture’ (a play on his supposed amphibious features) became popular on social media as an oblique way of criticising Xi’s rule and praising China’s relative openness under Jiang.
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The Stand with Eamon Dunphy podcast. 15 December 2022
Journalist and author Ian Williams talks to Eamon about China’s lifting of zero covid restrictions in response to protests, Chinese authorities' pursuit of the Hong Kong entrepreneur and activist Jimmy Lai and Xi Jinping's Belt and Road initiative and how it's penetrating the world's infrastructure.
My 3 September 2022 interview with Michael Alexander of The Courier on the dangerous dependency of Scottish universities on Chinese money … and much more
My 30 October 2022 interview with Judith Duffy of the Scottish Sunday National on the Chinese Communist Party’s covert police stations in Britain and its wider influence operations.
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The Andrew Marr Show on LBC, 28 November 2022
In conversation with Andrew Marr about the biggest protests in decades in China against draconian zero-Covid restrictions
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The Sunday Times, 30 October 2022
Zero. That is now the sum total of women at the centre of power in Xi Jinping’s China. There are no women in the Chinese Communist Party’s 24-strong politburo and none in the seven-person standing committee. The top party bodies now consist entirely of middle-aged men, picked for their blind loyalty to the leader. How have they got away with it?
In a spectacle to warm the hearts of Iran’s clerics, the all-male Chinese elite was on parade at the party congress last weekend that saw Xi grab an unprecedented third term as leader, paving the way for him to rule China for life. The men-only line-up is indicative of a wider malaise — Xi’s decade in power has seen the gender gap widen, while feminists have been muzzled and high-profile cases of alleged assault and harassment have gone unpunished.
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Daily Mail, 29 October 2022
The scene is like something from a horror film. A horde of terrified shoppers battling a crew of uniformed guards, desperate to escape the building in which they have been locked.
It looks like hysteria after a terror attack — yet this is footage from a Saturday afternoon at an Ikea store in Shanghai, following an announcement that a Covid case had been traced to the shop.
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The Independent Republic of Mike Graham on TalkTV, 28 October 2022
Talking Zero-Covid madness and much else with Mike Graham on TalkTV
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The Stand podcast, 27 October 2022
In conversation with Eamon Dunphy about the Chinese Communist Party Congress and the anointment of Xi Jinping to a 3rd term as party boss - the most powerful leader since Mao - and what that means for China and the world.
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The Sunday Times, 10 September 2022
When Xi Jinping sent his condolences on Friday, the palace could be forgiven a wry smile. For while the Queen usually kept her opinions to herself, she was not nearly as discreet about China’s communist leaders.
Not only did she have a better grasp of the thuggish reality of Xi’s rule than many of her ministers, but she helped expose one of the most demeaning pieces of modern British diplomacy.
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The Spectator, 26 August 2022
China is struggling to limit the impact of its longest and most widespread heatwave since records began more than 60 years ago. Temperatures have reached the highest the country has ever recorded and a drought is wreaking havoc across much of southern China. It is compounding the multiple economic challenges facing China’s communist leaders, including the fallout from strict Covid-19 lockdowns and a bursting property bubble
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The Sunday Times, 20 August 2022
They were supposed to be China’s trailblazers — the most educated generation in the country’s history, the foot soldiers building Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream” of a strong and prosperous country. Instead, almost one in five young Chinese are jobless. There is little prospect of that improving any time soon, with unpredictable and potentially dangerous consequences for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
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The Spectator, 18 August 2022
Chinese spy ship that docked in Sri Lanka on Tuesday in defiance of Indian and western protests is the latest symbol of China’s power and ambition in the Indian Ocean. It is also a stark demonstration and warning of the harder edges of Beijing’s debt trap diplomacy.
The Yuan Wang 5, bristling with satellite dishes and antennas, is described by China as a ‘research and scientific vessel’. In reality it is one of the latest generation of space-tracking ships, able to monitor satellites, as well as rocket and intercontinental ballistic missile launches. There is speculation that it carries a fleet of underwater drones. It is in other words, a formidable piece of surveillance kit.
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The Spectator, 10 August 2022
Chinese social media is full of anger and frustration – because the military didn’t shoot down Nancy Pelosi’s plane. As she headed to Taiwan, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) whipped up a wave of rabid online nationalism. Influential commentators led by Hu Xijin, the former editor of the CCP’s Global Times, suggested the speaker of the US House of Representatives could be taken out, a view that was widely applauded …
… Expect more tantrums, and more visits – because thanks to China, Taiwan has become a ‘must-go’ destination for any self-respecting democrat.
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The Sunday Times, 7 August 2022
Three residents of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, are discussing where to hide in the event of a Chinese invasion. “Run for the hills,” says one. “Down the metro,” says another. “No, no,” says the third. “Let’s head to a chip factory. They’re much safer!” — the point of the popular joke being that semiconductors made on the island are so critical to the world economy that nobody would dare attack a fabrication plant.
Taiwanese often turn to dark humour during tense times, and tension across the Taiwan Strait has soared to levels not seen in decades. Last week China surrounded the island with live-fire military drills, and growled that it would make America and Taiwan pay for the visit by Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. -
The Sunday Times, 31 July 2022
China is being swept by a new kind of protest — stealthy, rapid and difficult for the country’s communist leaders to suppress. Tens of thousands of homebuyers are withholding mortgage payments on their unfinished homes, fearing their money is being stolen by property developers …
… Globally, China is increasingly overextended and unloved. It is all a long way from the vaunting promise of the ‘China century’ — which in 2015 motivated David Cameron to raise a pint with a visiting Xi Jinping in an attempt to make Britain China’s “best friend in the West”.
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Spectator, 23 July 2022
HSBC was being more than a little disingenuous when it claimed on Thursday that Communist party cells don’t have much influence on the businesses in which they are installed. Try telling that to Xi Jinping, under whom the CPP has extended its tentacles into every aspect of nominally private businesses in China.
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The Sunday Times, 17 July 2022
China’s first homegrown narrow-body passenger jet recently completed its debut test flight, a triumph of local innovation, according to China’s communist leaders. It is better described as a stolen plane, developed by plundering secrets from western aerospace companies on a breathtaking scale …
… it is only the latest example of efforts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to spy on the world in an attempt to stay ahead of its rivals in technology, industry, politics and power. The threat is enormous — but one that Britain in particular has hardly begun to grasp.
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Stories of our times podcast, 21 July 2022
The heads of MI5 and the FBI recently warned about the growing threat from China’s efforts to spy on the world as it attempts to stay ahead of rivals in technology, industry, politics and power. But has Britain been slow to grasp the scale of the issue?
Guest: Ian Williams, author, 'The Fire of the Dragon: China’s New Cold War' and contributor to The Sunday Times.
Host: Manveen Rana.
The Spectator cover story, 4 August 2022
Nowhere is watching Russia’s faltering attempt to crush its democratic neighbour more closely than Taiwan. The Ukraine war is seen in Taipei as a demonstration of how determined resistance and the ability to rally a global alliance of supporters can frustrate a much larger and heavily armed rival. Taiwan has spent the past few years planning how it would cope if China attacked. It is developing a doctrine of defence warfare right out of the Ukrainian playbook.
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The Spectator weekend essay, 1 May 2022
Xi Jinping has made his choice. He is sticking with his ‘best friend’ Vladimir Putin, and no end of Russian atrocities or wishful thinking in the west is going to alter that. Their axis of autocracy presents a far-reaching challenge to western democracies, which the UK in particular is struggling to come to terms with.
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The Daily Mail, 28 April 2022
The red flatbed trucks began arriving after dawn, men in white hazmat suits unloading sections of green metal caging.
Residents peered nervously from windows of tall apartment blocks, as the figures below erected the fencing across the entrances to their skyscrapers, caging them into their homes.
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Independent Republic Mike Graham on TalkTV, 26 April 2022
Discussing China’s increasingly fanatical zero-covid policy and the lockdown of 25 million people in Shanghai with Mike Graham
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The Sunday Times, 20 March 2022
Nobody has watched Russia’s attempts to crush its democratic neighbour more closely than Tsai Ing-wen, the president of Taiwan, for whom the courage and determination of the Ukrainian people are an inspiration. For the woman dubbed “Spicy Taiwanese Sister” on social media because of her willingness to stand up to China, it also reinforces the need to bolster Taiwan’s defences.
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The Sunday Times, 16 January 2022
‘The name is innocuous enough, as is the large nameless compound it occupies next to Communist Party headquarters in downtown Beijing. But the United Front Work Department is one of the most important tools of Communist Party power, a “magic weapon”, as Mao once called it. Until last week, it was targeting Britain with little resistance’
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The Spectator, 16 January 2022
‘With just three weeks until the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, Covid-19 is creeping ever closer to the capital. The Communist party is seeking to isolate Beijing from the rest of the country to keep the virus at bay and the games on track. But its zero-Covid policy, a desperate game of Whac-A-Mole with the virus, is looking increasingly unsustainable’
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The Spectator, 28 January 2022
‘The growing alliance between Russia and China is something we shouldn’t lose sleep over, their long history of mutual suspicion runs too deep – or so we are told. Such a view is too complacent by half. China and Russia’s mutual hostility towards the West and their opportunism also run deep. And even if their burgeoning alliance is a marriage of convenience, it is still a very dangerous one’
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The Spectator, 8 February 2022
‘Never before have the participants in a major sporting event been so closely monitored as in this Winter Olympics in Beijing. The 1980 Summer Olympics in Soviet Moscow were nothing in comparison. Athletes are competing under a blanket of observation, ostensibly to keep Covid at bay, yet imposed by a paranoid Communist party for whom critical words or thoughts are as dangerous as any virus,
The Spectator, 30 October 2021
The absence of Xi Jinping from COP26 in Glasgow this weekend should strip away any illusion that China is a serious partner on climate change. It also points to another intriguing possibility – that we may be witnessing not Peak Carbon, but Peak China. The Communist party may be facing the sort of decline it wishes on the West, and as with the climate, the impact could be dangerous and unpredictable …
The Spectator, 19 November 2021
Serena Williams has joined the growing ranks of international tennis stars expressing concern over the disappearance of Peng Shuai. The former world No. 1 said she was ‘devastated and shocked’ about the plight of the Chinese tennis star, who has not been seen since she accused a senior Communist party official of sexual assault …
The Spectator, 28 August 2021
The employee alleged that she was forced to drink heavily at a banquet during a business trip and was then sexually assaulted by her boss. She informed her managers, but they failed to act and told her to keep quiet. So she staged a protest in the company canteen and shared details of her ordeal in an 11-page document posted on a company message board ...
The Spectator, 31 July 2021
The most shocking thing about the news that the government is looking to remove China from Britain’s nuclear power programme is that it has taken so long. But it will not be a straight-forward process.
The Spectator, 22 August 2021
China greeted America’s chaotic retreat from Afghanistan and the Taliban seizure of power with a mixture of glee and trepidation.
Bloomberg Radio
Discussing US-China relations and China's surveillance state with Rishaad Salamat and Bryan Curtis on Bloomberg Daybreak Asia, 21 July 2021
The Spectator, 10 July 2021
One of the first places Professor Stephen Toope visited as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University was the Chinese embassy in London. He posed for photographs with ambassador Liu Xiaoming and the two men discussed furthering the ‘golden era’ of China-UK relations …
The Spectator, 24 July 2021
There is, it seems, no regime too odious to be a partner of China. Being repressive and corrupt have long been useful assets for gaining the friendship of Beijing, but its recent embrace of the ‘Butcher of Damascus’, Bashar al-Assad, carries reputational and other risks for China – even when it doesn’t have much of a reputation to lose …
The Spectator, 4 July 2021
Days after a nuclear power plant began spewing deadly radiation, the ruling Communist party pushed ahead with a huge and self-indulgent celebration of the sort that had become a hallmark of its rule. This was no time for bad news, and the party delayed, dithered and hid the truth about the deadly events that were unfolding …
The Spectator, 6 July 2021
It is widely acknowledged that Britain has some of the world’s finest cyber capabilities. GCHQ is a global leader in those dark arts, and its offshoot, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), is making that expertise available to businesses and others in need of help with their digital defences. All the more shocking, then, that our political leaders seem so utterly clueless …
The World Today, June-July 2021 edition
What's next for China's surveillance state? I argue that the Communist Party is looking to make permanent the technology it field-tested with chilling effect during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that a new law supposedly to protect privacy cannot be taken seriously.
The Spectator, 28 June 2021
There can have been no more avid viewers of the CCTV footage of Matt Hancock’s snog and grope than China’s cyber spies, chuckling in some dark room in Beijing and asking each other, how can it have been so easy for somebody to obtain?
The Spectator, 1 July 2021
In a defiant speech to mark the Communist party’s centenary today, Xi Jinping warned foreign powers they would ‘have their heads bashed bloody against the Great Wall of Steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people’ if they tried to bully China.
The New European, 8 June 2021
The next test of the UK's muddled China policy will come in the marshlands of Essex. Here’s my story from this week's the New European on how Beijing investment in sensitive parts of the British economy is facing its nuclear moment.
The Spectator US, May 2021
Footage of a brutal late March attack on a 65-year-old Asian American woman in Manhattan drew widespread outrage on social media. It also made for a productive afternoon for Zhao Lijian. From his Beijing office, the Chinese government spokesman retweeted 20 posts and shared the video 12 times on his official Twitter account …
The Spectator, 17 April 2021
Here’s my take on the accelerting AI arms race and why western democracies need to be very wary of China’s tech giants, which are facilitating repression at home and are the international standard bearers of the surveillance state. Read more
The Sunday Times, 4 April 2021
Taipei, May 2022
Interviewing Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, and digital minister Audrey Tang in May 2022 during a visit to the island while researching my new book, Fire of the Dragon: China’s New Cold War
With Chris Patten at the Barnes Bookfest in September 2021. The former governor of Hong Kong and I discussed China, Hong Kong and my book on China’s surveillance state, Every Breath You Take: China’s New Tyranny. Patten described the books as ‘a superb and deeply informed study on containing a technological totalitarian state’.